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Monthly Archives: December 2007

Until recently, net neutrality was a difficult issue to explain at a
dinner party. It was even more of a struggle to get anybody worked up
about it. Now, thanks to the major Internet service providers (ISPs)
Comcast and Bell-Sympatico, the stakes are crystal clear and the acrid
scent of a smoking gun hangs in the room.

Is it in the carriers’ best interest to allow upstart cheap phone
companies like Skype or Vonage to suck up bandwidth with its inexpensive
and excellent service? Nope, but in a free market and a neutral Internet,
upstarts happen. The traditional players just don’t like it much and
want the nonsense to stop.

Newspapers and magazines won’t be the only media outlets endorsing
presidential candidates this election cycle.

Popular tech blog
TechCrunch will make its own picks for president,
giving its opinionated readership a voice on policy issues close to
tech-savvy Americans’ hearts.

Starting today, TechCrunch, which is read by more than 400,000 people
monthly according to Nielsen/NetRatings, will allow readers to vote on
its site for a Republican and a Democratic presidential candidate based
on the candidate’s stance on issues such as net neutrality and ID theft.

Throughout 2005 and 2006, a large underground debate raged regarding
the future of the Internet. More recently referred to as “network
neutrality,” the issue has become a tug of war with cable companies
on the one hand and consumers and Internet service providers on the
other. Yet despite important legislative proposals and Supreme Court
decisions throughout 2005, the issue was almost completely ignored in the
headlines until 2006.1 And, except for occasional coverage on CNBC’s
Kudlow & Kramer, mainstream television remains hands-off to this day
(June 2006).2

Most coverage of the issue framed it as an argument over regulation—but
the term “regulation” in this case is somewhat misleading. Groups
advocating for “net neutrality” are not promoting regulation of
internet content. What they want is a legal mandate forcing cable
companies to allow internet service providers (ISPs) free access to
their cable lines (called a “common carriage” agreement). This was
the model used for dial-up internet, and it is the way content providers
want to keep it. They also want to make sure that cable companies cannot
screen or interrupt internet content without a court order.

This is the first I’ve heard that “Internet service providers”
other than cable companies are on the side of consumers.
Doubtless AT&T will be gratified to hear that version.
Oh, wait: later the same writeup refers to “cable supporters like the
AT&T-sponsored Hands Off the Internet website.”
Also, what’s this about free access?
Continue reading →

1. The Users Revolt. As advertisers focus in on social networking sites,
users revolt against this trend, and power shifts in the worlds of Social
Networking from owner to user, on issues ranging from Second Life rules
and Facebook privacy to Cellphone Billing. Users will gain new leverage.

The Federal Communications Commission, at the urging of Chair Kevin
Martin, voted 3-2 on Tuesday to relax longstanding rules that block
corporations from owning a broadcast TV station and a newspaper in the
same city.

No, not specifically
newspaper and television consolidation.
Further consolidation of media and information distribution in
the hands of a tiny number of companies.
This December the FCC lets newspapers and TV stations consolidate.
Last December it let SBC buy Bellsouth.
Internet access is already in the hands of a tiny number of companies
(typically at most two in any given area) that are increasingly
moving to control the information they carry on behalf of a small
number of companies including themselves and movie and music content
producers.

The exaflood politics isn’t really about how much infrastructure
the duopoly has to build out.
It’s about maintaining the duopoly and extending its control of information,
to the duopoly’s short-term profit and the long-term detriment of
of us all, including the duopoly.

We should not fear the exaflood, however. It is key to the innovative
new services and applications that appear almost daily. Consider the
growing number of universities that are making course lectures available
online, often in real time. Or telemedicine programs that are transmitting
medical images and linking patients with distant specialists for real-time
consultations.

Everybody’s familiar with consumer identity privacy, as in protecting passwords
and social security numbers and complying with HIPAA, GLBA, SOX, PIPEDA,
et al.
But what about packet privacy?

Never mind net neutrality, I want my privacy. As in packet privacy. The
telcos say they need to sell non-neutral routing of traffic to recover
the cost of building broadband networks. Moving from the Internet,
where a packet-is-a-packet, to something that looks suspiciously like
the 20th century telephone network requires remarrying the content and
connectivity that TCP/IP divorced. It requires deep packet inspection. It
requires looking at the content of communication.

AT&tT does not plan to roll out two physical pipes to every end point
in order to sell Google enhanced access. The new telco plan calls for
content-based routing to separate traffic into media and destination
specific VPNs (Virtual Private Networks). Laws exist to address the
substantial privacy threats created by the fact telephone companies
know Mr. Smith called Mr. Jones, but the privacy risks associated
with “content routing” replacing “end point routing” enter an
different realm.

Despite Berninger’s phrasing, packet privacy isn’t something separate from
net neutrality: it’s one of the key features of it.
The point is that net neutrality isn’t just about pricing policies
or technical means of content routing: it’s about privacy.
And privacy is an issue that everybody understands.
Stifling, throttling, or disconnecting without announced limits, censoring, wiretapping, and espionage:
these are all violations of packet privacy.

U.S. presidential candidate John Edwards is for net neutrality,
already sent a letter to the FCC about it,
and would only appoint FCC commissioners who support it.
He also gets the connection with media consolidation:

“What we have to do is make certain the net
does not go the way of broadcast television and commercial radio
where only a few corporate voices are heard.”

That third point is a bit difficult to implement, given that Copowi
provides its DSL as a reseller for AT&T, Quest, and Verizon,
but at least their heart’s in the right place: they’re for equal access,
innovation, participation, and lower cost.

Now if they can also deliver reliable and inexpensive service
with good marketing….

Promising unlimited access, not delivering, and refusing to admit it
is managing a network for the good of the many above the activities of the few?
Pete Abel thinks so:

Earlier this month, Comcast — the nation’s largest cable broadband
company — was caught doing what any good Internet Service Provider (ISP)
should do, i.e., manage its network to ensure that the online activities
of the few don’t interfere with the online activities of the many,

The biggest problem with what Comcast (and
Cox, and AT&T, and Verizon)
are doing is that their typical customer has at most one or two choices,
which in practice means that if your local cable company and your local
telephone company choose to stifle, throttle, block, or terminate,
you have no recourse, because there’s nowhere to go.
Competition would fix that.

Abel tries to back up his peculiar interpretation of network management
with revisionist history:
Continue reading →